Mango is decidedly the most popular fruit among the teeming millions of people in the Orient, specially in the land of its origin, the Indian sub-continent. The popular myth is that the Portuguese brought mango to Goa. The truth is that they only taught our forefathers the technique of clonal multiplication by grafting so that superior “types” could be perpetuated as “varieties” or as “cultivars”. The cultivated varieties, or cultivars, may not be distinctly different botanically. The mango cultivars bear Goan names and surnames like Afonso, Colaco, Monserrate, Xavier and so on. Our surnames may have originated in Portugal, not the mango varieties!

The mango tree is a native of the Indo-Malayan region [North-East India and the neighbouring countries of Myanmar, Malaysia and Indonesia] according to Dr. S. K. Mukherjee. The scientific name, Mangifera indica [literally meaning “mango yielding tree of India”] tells us about the origin of the tree in no uncertain terms. The Portuguese word “Manga” for mango is actually a corruption of the Malayalam word for the fruit “Mangai”. Blame the name on Vasco da Gama’s Kozhikode [Calicut’s new name, resurrected from the archives] connection or the earlier Portuguese traders who may have been doing business in Indian spices with the Malayali “Moplah” seafarers in some Arabian haunt. That is the truth.

There are forty-one species of the genus Mangifera which have edible fruits. Of these only three species ... M. indica, M. sylvatica [of the forest] and M. zeylanica [of Sri Lanka]… are found in India. Only one species, M. indica, has all the known commercial varieties of mango. At the Konkan Fruit Fest 2008, Dr. S. P. Singh, Horticultural Scientist of ICAR-Goa displayed fruits of Mangifera sylvatica that he found on a tree in Siolim. That is a discovery. Perhaps, one will soon find a few seedlings and grafts of this species in the mango block at Ela Farm.

Over the years we have learnt the ABC of mango varieties: Afonsa, Bemcurada, Colaco, deSouza, Elangovan, Fernandina, Gola, Hilario, Jehangir, Kensington, Langda, Malcurada, Neelum, Olour, Pairi, Rajapuri, Secretina, Temudo, Udgo, Vellaikolumban, Xavier, and Yerra Malgoa and Zill Irwin. I do not know of varieties in I, Q and W, but they may exist, too. There are many varieties for each alphabet in the country that boasts of a thousand-plus varieties, India. Langda is a variety named after “Timur Lang” or “Tamerlane”, the warrior-emperor who loved mangoes. Perhaps, “Temudo” or Chimut also has a similar origin. Manga Hilario is named after the father of Raul Fernandes, the former Education Minister of Goa , Daman & Diu.

The earliest known technique of vegetative propagation was “air-layering” or “gootee”, wherein a branch is induced to produce roots and is then separated as a new plant. This practice, perfected by the Moghuls to create the famous “Lakh Bagh” at Dharbanga-Bihar during the time of Akbar [1556-1605], is no longer practiced in mango though it is still popular for easy-to-root citrus species.

The first grafting technique was the “Approach Grafting” or “Bhett kalam”, where the seedling is raised in an earthen pot and used for grafting on the tree. This laborious technique was popular till the mid-1980s when “Epicotyl grafting” or “Stone grafting” began to replace it due to the convenience and higher survival rates under coastal conditions. This will remain the popular technique till some micro-propagation technique for “tissue culture” is developed.

Selection of “Chance seedlings” with superior fruit quality was the method of obtaining new cultivars. Hilario, deSouza, Cardozo Malcurada, etc are all chance seedlings that caught the attention of the owner and were then propagated by grafting. That has been the story for the last 4000 odd years. According to Dr. K. L. Chadha [Punjab Horticulture Journal, 1979], the first hybridization programme in mango was initiated by Burns and Prayag in 1921 at Pune. Incidentally, a Goan scientist, Dr. Caetano X. Furtado [who has a palm species, Phoenix furtadonna, named in his honour] was also at the Pune agriculture college during that period.

The earliest mango hybrids to be released were Mehmood Bahar and Prava-Shankar, both with Bombai and Kalipaddy as their parent plants. Released in the early 1940s, they did not become popular in the British Raj India. At Agriculture Research Station [ARS] at Kodur in Andhra Pradesh, a hybrid of the regular bearer Neelam and the choice mango variety Baneshan [Banganpally] was made. The product, named Neeleshan, was the best hybrid mango variety according to Dr. K.C. Naik [1948], an authority on mango during that period.

The South Indian mango variety “Neelam” has since been one of the parents of most of the hybrids like Neeluddin, Neeleshan, Neelgoa, Mallika, Amrapally, Ratna and indirectly of its hybrid, Sindhu. However, Indian Institute for Horticulture Research-Bangalore released Arka Aruna [H-10] and Arka Anmol [H-13] which are reciprocal crosses of Alphonso with Baneshan. It was a happy time doing research at IIHR under the guidance of Dr. M. D. Subramanyam, the man who released these varieties, and Dr. M. R. Dinesh who succeeded him as the head of the Fruits Division and supported us in presenting the first Konkan Fruit Fest in 2003 at Campal. Dr. Dinesh, continues in the footsteps of his Ph.D. guide, Dr. C .P. A. Iyer. He is doing research on a number of Goan mango varieties that I took to IIHR during my research there [1987-89]. Some of the grafts came from Dr. Oswald de Souza, an ophthalmologist with a fruity vision who can drive people nuts about fruits!

Contact your nearest Zonal Agriculture Office [there is one in every taluka town, except Vasco] or ICAR-Goa and book your mango grafts now. Next week we will see how to plant them with the onset of monsoons. (ENDS)

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The above article appeared in the May 25, 2008 edition of the Herald, Goa